Games Archives - Page 350 of 690 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Season of the Forge

November 28, 2018 by Belghast

For the last few days I have been on the cusp of coming down with something I think, but the problem is my schedule does not really allow me to take a day off right now to recuperate. If I were to take off right now, deadlines would suffer… so as a result I have been taking some over the counter stuff to try and limp along until I can collapse. Last night however I probably should not have taken that NyQuil, because this morning… I am groggy as hell. Last night however was the beginning of the 5th season of Destiny 2 and it seems like they are mixing things up a bit. For the last few seasons in Diablo 3 there has been an overarching theme to a new season… and it seems like maybe Bungie is borrowing this concept. The latest “This Week At Bungie” blog post goes into more detail about this, but there is a fairly packed roadmap content wise that we can look forward to.

As far as last night… I focused on starting the Pinnacle Weapon quests that I actually feel like I have a shot at getting before the end of the season.

Pinnacle Weapons are more or less a unique weapon that you can grind for during the season. There is one tied to Vanguard Strikes, another tied to the Gambit event, and another tied to how far progressed you make it rank wise in the Crucible. Given that I love Autorifles because I am a noob… I decided to spend a good deal of last night working on trying to get the Gambit based weapon called Breakneck. I think in part I just like the old world feel of the weapons that The Drifter offers. As you can see you need to play a minimum of 40 matches of Gambit, and also do a bunch of other things in the process. Now my hope is that by the time I have played my 40… I will have long since completed the other objectives. My goal is to play a handful of rounds of Gambit and run a few Strikes every night to begin whittling away at this objective over time. The truth is that will probably hold for a bit and then I will spend a weekend grinding nothing but that activity so I can get the weapon.

With a new season, comes a new set of cash shop engrams… and throughout the night last night I unlocked four of these… one of which happening to give me this sweet Ghostrider themed sparrow. I also pulled an exotic ship that is themed after Warmind/SIVA but it isn’t anywhere near as cool looking. This however immediately became my new main sparrow as I ride around on flaming nonsense. All it is missing is a bunch of skulls. I really like the Scorn as a faction, and I love how all of their tech seems even more improvised than even that of the Fallen. All in all it was a good night and a largely quiet one as I slowly whittled away at collecting powerful and prime engrams. I have finally reached the point where I am pretty regularly getting 600 light items… so my hope is in the next few days to be able to hit that item cap before Black Armory bumps it up by 50 again. It really is a great time to be playing Destiny 2.

If you prefer to consume this information from a Bungie Vidoc… they also have you taken care of as a nice one released yesterday attempting to differentiate between the content players will be getting for free and the content locked behind the Annual Pass.

Powerleveling Gun

November 27, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I did not join in FFXIV Eureka shenanigans, largely because I was not feeling terribly sociable. This is was and will probably continue to be a trying week, as is often the case when we come back from a significant break. In my case I was out five days, and while I spent a good chunk of the first day at the hospital… it was still enough time to get thoroughly out of the habit of going to work on a regular basis. Instead I spent my night roaming around in Destiny 2 and doing puttering sort of activities, in part because I had knocked down the vast majority of the major stuff over the weekend. The thing I did not realize however is that yesterday was also the final day of the season, and I am a little bummed out that this was apparently the first season that Greysky Armada will not have maxed out guild rank… and will not be earning the banner pole. I myself have done next to nothing to contribute to this, so in the grand scheme of things I am okay with this… just a little sad.

Instead of doing things on my Titan main, I opted to instead piddle around on my Hunter who has not really been dusted off since the launch of Curse of Osiris. It is really weird to have the start of three different content blocks… Curse of Osiris, Warmind, and Forsaken all on the director map. I play this game incorrectly… and what I mean by that is my preference is to level to the new numerical cap before starting any of the story driven content. My thought process is something like this… if I grind the levels on something like strikes or heroic public events… I can use the story as a light leveling experience, meaning anything I happen to get along the way is actually useful gear instead of something that I immediately relegate to the shard bin. This may or may not be worthwhile but it is the pattern that I find myself falling into over and over again.

Traditionally I have focused on doing nothing but Titan public events, since by the time you down one of them there is often times another one just about to spawn on the other half of that relatively small map. With the advent of planetary bounties, I have started focusing on those instead and knocking out a full round of the planets that I have access to. Each time you turn in one of the bounties it appears to be a significant jump in experience and as a result I am sitting at level 37 out of 50… and wondering if the Black Armory is going to bump up both Light Level cap and Level Cap. Grinding in Destiny is my jam, and I find it extremely peaceful to roam around and knock out patrols and public events.

This process has been bolstered by the fact that apparently the gun I ground for during the Halloween event, may not have a minimum level cap to equip or at least it is equipable at my lowest level which is 30. I was swapping gear around through DIM… and if you don’t know about Destiny Item Manager you should totally stop what you are doing and check it out. Without really realizing what I was doing I swapped my 600 item level Horror Story over to my Hunter… and it equipped without issue. This means that immediately I started getting gear that is way higher than I probably should at the equivalent level. Sure some of it isn’t necessarily usable due to level restrictions… but some of it is and as such this weapon that is an arguably worse version of the Origin Story… serves as a light level booster. Similarly I tried it out on my 289 Light Level Warlock… and once again I could equip it just fine.

With the opening of a brand new season…. I will likely be putting the Huntress to bed once again, however the sheer fact that I am interested in playing my alts tells you a lot about the improvement to the current state of Destiny 2. When the PS4 version released I ground up all three of my classes to 305 light, and used them as a sort of spring board each week to help me level up my weapons… which in turn then drug up the level of my armor. With the PC release… I only had the oomph to get the three characters leveled… but never spent time gearing them other than the Titan. I lost steam… and Curse of Osiris did not really help that, and at which point I seemingly became a player that only really played my main. Now I am back in the mood to fiddle with the other classes and see what sorts of trouble I can get up to with them as well. Essentially the desire to play is greater once more than the total package of content available to me on any one character… which is saying an awful lot given that there are so many opportunities for Powerful/Prime engrams.

Like I have said before… Destiny 2 is in its best state ever, and one that I feel probably rivals the state of Destiny 1 during Year 3 (and honestly the current state since it has largely been frozen in time). If you have access to the game I highly suggest checking it out again. If you have any questions or need help, feel free to holler at me through one of the many channels folks have to holler at me through.

Lurk Longsword

November 21, 2018 by Belghast

This morning is a little bit odd given that I am not at work, but also had to get up at 5:30 like normal. I guess I technically didn’t but I still have things that need to get done. My mother in law is going into the hospital today for a lung biopsy, so I would greatly appreciate any thoughts, prayers or just general good vibes channeled her direction. Our hope is of course that it isn’t anything serious, but just the act of taking a biopsy from your lungs is fairly serious. A few days ago I wrote about how hardcore mobile gamers can be, and I guess further evidence proves that even more true. Yesterday I booted up Walking Dead Our World while waiting on a meeting just to check and see what objectives I should be focused on… and found that I had been kicked from the group that I wrote about. It seems as thought a group leader can see various stats about the players, and it appears that it is common place to purge anyone not killing at least 200 walkers a day.

I am WAY more casual than that… and I had apparently somehow avoided notice for a few weeks before the hammer dropped down upon me. I don’t even really know the people in the clan, but it was surprising how much it generally bummed me out. I’ve since joined another group, but I have to say… the drive to play is largely gone. Previously I felt like I was working towards something with a bunch of other players, but now I mostly just don’t care as I have to get acclimatized to another group of randos. I’ve contemplated forming my own group and calling it something along the lines as “Casual AF” and just seeing what sort of players I get to join. The clan size is limited to 25 players, so if you are in a group of high achievers I totally get why they might want to punt casuals. The objectives are things like kill 300 armored walkers with a specific character, and in a given encounter you might come across two of them… meaning at that rate you would have to take out 150 of these randomly occurring encounters to get the objective. The game is balanced for hardcore players, so also maybe not balanced for me personally. It was interesting while it lasted.

One of the things I love about the Kulve Taroth event is the random weapons that you end up walking away with. Generally speaking there are a few gems scattered in amongst the dross… and one of them is this longsword. The base damage is a little low, but it makes up for it in the utility of having a longsword with fairly reasonable paralysis on it. Ultimately I have been using this a lot as I have been taking on the Devil May Cry event quest where you fight four different monsters, and this ends up giving a fairly early proc of paralysis to help out the burn phase. It also works shockingly well on Kulve Taroth itself, which is goofy given how damned big that is to see it paralyzed. It does allow for a lot of good burn time whenever it happens which makes me heavily favor the weapon, and if I shifted out my item build a bit I could get quite a bit of white sharpness on it.

I also spent a good deal of time last night playing Final Fantasy XIV and managed to get off high center in the quest chain. There was a very specific quest that I was struggling with, that involved killing a bunch of mech suits that cast self destruct. This stupid thing took me roughly four attempts to finally get through it, and is one of those fights where the NPCs are vulnerable to death… and if they die you instant fail. I finally figured out exactly what I was supposed to be doing and on the last attempt it felt way less arbitrary. I will say this is one of the frustrations at times with Final Fantasy XIV… is that for all of the really good visual messaging… there are at times in the solo quests that they don’t give you much of an explanation of what you are supposed to be doing. My hope however is that this gets me unstuck and I can continue questing my way through all of the Main Story Quest content that I had missed.

Tiny Samurai vs Eureka

November 20, 2018 by Belghast

One of the things that happened over the weekend that we did not talk about on the podcast, nor have I mentioned on the blog… was the reveal of the next Final Fantasy XIV expansion Shadowbringers at the Las Vegas Fan Fest. I mentioned Fan Fest when I was talking about BlizzCon and how they only hold one when they have a big announcement to give us information about. As such you go into the experiencing knowing you are going to see something really cool, and while the trailer for Shadowbringers is cool… it was not the big reveal of the weekend. That said I do find it interesting that we are not going where I thought we were going at various points in the Stormblood storyline. It seems like in order to restore balance… we are to become the Warrior of Darkness.

The more important reveal however was that of the Blue Mage… aka the MMO class that I questioned if was even possible to do in a multiplayer game. With it they are introducing this concept of “Limited Jobs” and by that they mean Jobs that you can do… but are purely solo/open world only. Blue Mage will launch with 4.5 and be locked to a maximum of level 50 in progression. Like a Blue Mage in any other Final Fantasy game, you will not learn new skills by leveling up and instead learn them by fighting the monsters that perform certain abilities. So to learn Bad Breath you will need to fight a Morbal and watch it do that move… or similarly you will need to watch a Sabotender do 1000 Needles to be able to pick it up and start doing it yourself. I really dig this concept because it allows them to do this class with all of its flavor and power… without having to worry about balancing it against any other class. Level 5 Death would have been super hard to balance around… and I am wondering if they will start bringing other challenging classes in to the game under this Limited Jobs banner.

All of this thought about Final Fantasy XIV lead me to patch it up, and attempt to figure out where the hell I left off in the Stormblood post expansion main story quest. I bounced very hard on Stormblood and I am still not entirely certain why, but after leveling the Warrior and then grinding up the Samurai… I just ran out of steam. I’ve made a few attempts to get engaged again and similarly bounced out. Hell recently there have been a few times I logged into the game and then right back out when I wasn’t exactly sure what I needed to do in order to gain traction. All of this time however Sol has kept Greysky Armada active and there is a group of folks that do a cycle of regular events. Last night was Eureka night and I decided to log in and join the shenanigans.

Ultimately it was myself, Mor, eventually Neph and a character that I have seen around but can’t really place a person to… being babysit by Pix who deserves a hero medal for easing us all into the concept of Eureka. I remember when this first opened I spent some time solo grinding and managed to make it to level 2 just by killing random stuff. It seemed insanely grindy and a love song to Final Fantasy XI which itself was effectively the Japanese version of Everquest. Soloing it was miserable but with a group of friends it felt an awful lot better. Even more so once we started gathering up the materia shards that effectively gave us a 60% damage boost. I entered the night at level 2 and managed to push through to level 8 before we finally called it because it was getting late.

Seriously Pix deserves massive thanks at herding us around Eureka and helping us get the objectives we needed to get knocked out. Effectively he was out of group and AOE taunting everything onto him… while we sat there killing it down as fast as possible. As a result I spent most of the night as Samurai and while it took me a bit to remember how to play the class it eventually came back. When Neph joined us I feel like she went through the same thing with Machinist… which I guess is to be expected for as long as we have been gone. I know they have other themed nights, like one in which they do crafting maps… so for the time being I am probably going to be logging in and doing those activities at least until I get my bearings. I had an awful lot of fun, and I most of it was due to the fact that I was getting to hang out with a bunch of friends that I had not hung out with in a really long time.